The Departure from this LIfe of Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden...

                            

                                  5-28-11

 The Apparently Unanticipated Departure of Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden from this Life and World Whilst Enjoying the Cozying Pleasures of Pornography: Death of a Malevolent Grandpa.

   In the relative cool of the early night, in Abbottabad, a moderate-sized city of a bit under one million residents, about the same number as you would find in San Jose, California, a T.V. set threw its flickering light on the walls of a shabby, threadbare room and, upon its sole occupant, an elderly- seeming man, grey-bearded, hunched forward upon a throw pillow. Eyes riveted to the images displayed on the old, coat- hanger- for- an- antennae- technology television before him, with its myriad of electric cords binding together a small array of electronic devices, he saw and heard nothing but himself, a few years younger, standing tall, beard darkened, his eyes vigorous and alert, looking softly into hell as he called upon his followers to wreak havoc on those he had so often deemed, and thus declared, to be the minions of evil.

   Abbottabad, a city whose main industry is its military institutions, with multitudes of officers, active and retired, a mere thirty-one miles north-east of Pakistan’s capitol city of Islamabad, where the common language is Hindko, and whose only professional sports team is the cricket- playing Abbottabad Falcons, had harbored the world’s “most wanted” man, probably for several years.

   Ironic, for certain, that he would take his refuge, not in the harsh, romanticized mountains of Tora Bora, where the major floral growth is poppy flowers for opium, and, scraggly jihad beards, but in a city founded in the mid-1800s by then Major James Abbott, a member of the British Raj, and author of the poem Abbottabad in its (his??) honor. Possibly the most horrid, sappy, honey-dripping poem in the English language other than Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, Abbottabad, the poem, stands forever as a less-than-grand example of the lasting cataclysmic effects of colonialism on culture.

   But I digress. It happens. Actually, rather frequently.

   What, you ask, sagely, could so distract this wily, ever-alert leader of hordes of jihadists from the sounds of a very large helicopter crashing down into his eighteen foot high walled-in compound with barbed wire trim, and no internet connections or phone lines?

   Well, apparently, when he wasn’t rocking back and forth, mesmerized by his own days-gone-by image and memories of murders undertaken, he took further refuge in the pornographic images stored on several of the compound’s computers. The man who had condemned America for “ selling your daughters with no clothes on without shame in order to sell your products”, sat now, in the warm embrace of Pakistan’s military heart, warmly embracing himself, visually and venially, and failed to notice, until just a bit too late, that a wife lay before him and a bullet had unceremoniously entered his head.

   “Oh, Abbattobad, we are leaving you now

   To your natural beauty I do bow.”